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So I have seen lots of reports saying that the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard is the smoothest thing ever, and having gone out and bought a copy of Snow Leopard because the Royal Mail can’t decide if they want to ever deliver my Family Pack, I plumped for upgrading my Mac Mini.

Well it wasn’t an upgrade as it turns out. As there was no data that I needed to keep on the Mini, I decided to do a fresh install. This meant popping the Snow Leopard disk in and then wiping the Mini’s 80Gb internal drive before installing. The installation took about 45 minutes at which point it hung. I didn’t associate the Mini with a MobileMe account, I simply defined a user id and it then got to it’s “Talking with Apple” stage. My router is set up to provide DHCP and I was using a cable to connect the mini, so that wasn’t the issue. My internet connection was fine and I was able to browse the Apple web site from my Mac Pro, but the Snow Leopard install still just sat there… for two and a half hours.

Ooops...

Tired of waiting I switched the Mac Mini off then back on again. Sure enough, this time it booted up (very quickly) and then told me that it didn’t recognize my Apple Wireless Keyboard, prompting me to press the key to the right of the Shift key so it could figure it out. Nothing. The prompt wouldn’t go away, however I opened Text Editor and the keyboard was working fine so I simply killed off the prompt. After installing a small update for Remote Screen or something, that was it my Mac Mini had been 10.6’d.

Was it as smooth and painless for me? Not quite.

Is it quicker? Yes, but then I had installed Norton Antivirus for Mac (as an experiment) on the Mac Mini and I reckon just not having that installed any more makes it much quicker.

Next is the 2008 Mac Pro which is my main work machine. Again, I think I shall do a fresh install so that I can get rid of six months accumulated junk. In the meantime, I think I’ll start using the Mac Mini s an application test bed to see if some of those question marks on the Compatibility List are ticks or crosses.